Month: August 2018

Another Summer writing period finished, and tomorrow I embark on the final year of, to quote Oscar Santana, my douchebag thirties.

All apologies if I kind of seemed off-in-space on these. As I said, I really do wonder if a big part of what I was doing was because I was so miserable.

I just got off the phone with a recruiter trying to get me back in to where I was for the bad situation in Norfolk. I doubt I’ll have any opportunity, but that I’m even willing to consider it is evidence of how much I was fucked up.

Was it better than what I was dealing with the first round in the icebox? Yes. Was it good? Fuck no. But that there’s no do-not-consider note, and that I might reciprocate says a lot.

At the same time, I am more than satisfied with where I am, now.

What a change from last year.

And just as I started to rank things, I quit.

2015 I was broke.

2016 I was working like a dog, getting treated like shit, and my health was about to go off-the-rails. (My first hospital stay was in September of that year….)

2017 I was unemployed, after a few more unsuccessful months in the blast chiller.

2018, well, read some of what I’ve written this month, and you decide.

But I did it. All finished. Now time to celebrate some, I suppose.

Or watch John Brennan backing down from his treason claims as fast as he fucking can.

One of the podcasts I routinely listen to regularly has been hitting on lately is about how people’s memories of things change over time.

They do, certainly, but I think, maybe, keeping track of what you’re thinking and doing helps clarify things for later?

I’ve really taken it in the shorts over the past five years on top of being sick. Maybe what I’ve written will bring back clearer memories.

But, as I said the other day, I think I’d started doing these summer periods because I was so fucking miserable with my situation.

When I did this last year, I was about to start my next round in hell. Perhaps I should say that I regret going back there; I should have learned my lesson the first time.

But, no, I did what I did because it was the right thing to do for our situation. Things have changed.

Speaking of that, reading back through that exchange, “a——” is a pretty sizable staffing firm. So this was from August 2006, and sorta signified the start of the “gig economy” that was so widely-panned in the 2016 election.

My understanding of it was a bit misguided, thinking that they were only working two days per month, and were focused on selling Microsoft’s products.

I didn’t take into account the price of benefits. I wonder if someone would do the math on that compared to now to see what the difference is. Big companies are looking to peddle labor with a minimum of government meddling. So government just puts things that further discourage companies from hiring anybody full-time.

*shrug*

Free-write tomorrow to close things out. My head is pretty clear, even if my vision isn’t.

I was trolling through old entries again, and the one I found from 2002 is pretty lame. I was writing all about my newly-acquired Mac G3, where I was trying to get both System 9 and OS X 10.1 to work.

The fun part of that release was when Finder would crash, and the only way you could fix it was to ssh in, and reboot the host. Thankfully, things are more reliable these days.

That said, in my current role, I’m finding that there’s a lot I missed with UNIX and Loonix in the past few years. But, then, I didn’t have the position, money, or energy to spend time with any any of it.

I paid attention, even if I wasn’t able to do much hands-on. I could be sore about it, but the responsibility is split between me, myself, and the folks living in Federal Pound-Me-In-The-Ass Prison.

All that said, however, I do feel uncomfortable sometimes with the seat-of-the-pants moves. But not as uncomfortable as I was in my last round in the icebox, where they did whatever the fuck they thought would work, and blamed others when it didn’t.

Purportedly, things there are going higher. I have no idea what the status is on the complaint I filed.

((somewhat long rant about the hell I’ve been through deleted))

The dilemma I have is how much time I spend learning stuff that’s already obsolete. I’m relatively comfortable in both a real System V and Linux System V environment, though there’s blanks I have.

But how much do I focus on filling in those blanks when it’s already obsolete?

Hmmm.

Tough question.

Today is the start of the Thanksgiving babby birfday roll call. Interestingly, the two who celebrate today are two of the ones who are most removed from my life these days. One largely on account of actions taken against me (yes, I can hold a grudge). The other on account of adherence to a faith that worships a thoroughly corrupt political organization. I do wish both of them well, though I’m having trouble being upset about the lack of F2F. ‘What can I say; maybe that makes me a bad person.

I started writing a couple of days too early this year. Consequently, I’ll finish before my normal 20 August end date.

Kinda distracted by all of this.

So, another free-write today. It happens. That said, maybe that’s what I was trying to do all along. The writing is coming a lot more easily the past few days.

This has been floating around lately.
How can you purport to support “Net Neutrality” while supporting this sort of editing?

I don’t know. I think I wrote about that plenty of times.

You can’t be butthurt about Ajit Pai changing rules about Net Neutrality while at the same time favoring private organizations making choices to block speech.

Here’s where I am with it — there’s lots of shit on the Internet that I choose not to consume. Let me reiterate with emphasis; there’s lots of shit on the Internet that I choose not to consume. That it’s there has no effect, whatsoever, on me.

It’d be foolish for me to worry about things that do not affect me.

My Tysabri infusion really hasn’t kicked in yet, though I do feel better than I did, say, Thursday and Friday. More than a little miffed that my former insurer called me seeking information so they can try to fleece my new insurer, too.

Supposedly my wife has a new prompt she wanted to see me write on. I guess we’ll see.

Thankfully, though, I don’t have to work this weekend. I’m trying hard to be upset about that, though I am a bit disappointed that I can’t choose to have fun a couple of days next week. Whatever.

I was looking around trying to find things I’d written August 13ths in the past.

There’s really not a lot.

Reading back, though, there’s really four phases of my adult life.

College

After-college

After meeting my wife

After the medical establishment figuring out WTF is wrong with me.

Unfortunately, there’s no individual events I can place on the beginnings and ends of those phases. Of course, I couldn’t have known the hell that my body was going to go through. I couldn’t have known that the girl across the table with the shy smile, and pretty eyes would end up being with me.

Today went better than I could have expected at work. Though it took a long time, I got my infusion. So we’ll see what the rest of the week looks like.

Today, certainly, wouldn’t be anything I could mark as a beginning or end.

A lot of the day I spent watching coverage of what was going on in Charlottesville.

(How does Chrome’s inline spell-check think that I misspelled that?)

It doesn’t matter, though. People are lining up on two sides. I, naturally, hold both groups with disdain. Who’s worse? The neo-Nazis. No question. But the Antifa creeps are just that.

The frearless governor of Virginia told the Neo-Nazis to go home, and don’t come back. Yes. I say the same thing to the fucks who provoked them. I also say it to the people of his party who are trying to shove the party’s racist past down The Memory hole.

But you have to erase anything that might spoil your pretense when you’re going to point to how evil others are.

My take on it is a little different than most, certainly. The more I learn about my lineage, the less I know for sure. I do know that my mostly-white father left Mississippi in the early-70s to go kill a Commie for Mommy, and GTFO of the solid South. My grandmother used to tell stories of how the first time she was eligible to vote, her father (my great-grandfather) told her very forcefully that she was going to go vote for “Hairy-Ass” Truman. No, she went and voted for Dewey, but didn’t tell her dad that.

He was the son of two off-the-boat Irish immigrants with eleven kids living in very-blue Mississippi, and an adherent to Papist conspiracy.

Yesterday saw me getting into it with people on Twitter. Once again, perhaps even more forcefully than a year ago, I find myself as a party of one.

I’m listening to Dave Smith’s discussion about it on his most recent Part of the Problem podcast.

“I’m disgusted by a swastika, and a hammer and sickle>” Yep. Pretty much.

But what happened last year, and the reaction served to further categorize everyone into two groups.

No, there’s not only two sides to every issue. I can be opposed to both the national socialism, and democratic socialism.

Government exists to protect individual rights; life, liberty, and property.

Oh, but “property” isn’t listed in the Declaration of Independence!!1! But it is in the Fourteenth Amendment, saying that the government cannot abridge it without due process of law.

I guess things are lining up miles to my east to try to do this again in DC.

I won’t be going.

But I also won’t fall into lockstep with the predictable filtering tomorrow.

It’s a hot day here in the DC ‘burbs. I’d just assume not go anywhere until I actually have my Tysabri infusion. I’m wiped.

Of course, the dimwit Nazis are coming into the District today. I had a lot to say about what happened in Charlottesville last year, as we hit the one-year mark. I will write then. That said, this (http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/401293-some-dc-restaurants-will-refuse-service-to-white-nationalists) showed up on Twitter this morning.

I don’t know what to say about it, other than obey the law. If I owned a restaurant in DC this weekend, I would likely be open. I’d be selling bottled water, and nothing else. That way, I wouldn’t be yielding to the fucking Nazis, or violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964. My employees would have the day off, and it’d just be me at the door selling water I’d ordered from Sam’s Club at $30 per bottle.

((long description baleeted)) I’m not getting my infusion until next week. This sucks more than I can even say. When we move, if we’re close to the neurology clinic, I’m getting away from this bunch of incompetent folks.

Trying to figure out how to deal with household problems is tough when you’re hours away.

The new dentist I visited this morning has this weird paint-on fluoride he’s using. It feels strange.

I really do like my job, and I feel strange not working during the day. But I ran out of billable hours, so I’ll deal with the alone time.

Do I want lunch? I really didn’t eat breakfast because I was going to the dentist.

Putting periods on a bulleted list feels very wrong. At the same time, if I had a 1980s MBA, everything I ever wrote would be in a bulleted-list. In Power Point.

I did finally fill the final slot in the Fantasy Football league with my friend from college. With at least half the league being up here in NoVA, I’m hoping that people will be interested in doing a time or two of drinking.

It took me three days to get through this one podcast. It’s incredible how completely out-of-touch some of the folks are. (And I can’t read that without hearing it in Bill O’Reilly’s voice. Fuck it. We’ll do it live!)